In Enemy Hands

"But why come after us this way?" Venizelos asked. "The stealth I can understand, at least on the ones ahead of us, but we must've been right on top of Bandit One when we made our alpha translation. He had to see our footprint and get a good mass estimate off our impeller signature, so why wait, what? Over thirty-five minutes?, to start chasing us? Especially if he's a battlecruiser?"

"I don't know, Andy," McKeon said, never taking his eyes from Honor's. "Somebody must have picked up our footprint and warned the bastards in front of us, they certainly don't have the sensor range for it. So maybe that's what Bandit One's been doing: waiting until he was sure his buddies had received his alert."

"Probably," Honor agreed. "Not that an explanation really helps at this point." She crossed to Sarah DuChene's console and touched the astrogator on the shoulder. "Excuse me, Commander. I need to borrow your panel," she said almost absently. DuChene gave her a startled look, then moved out of her way, and Honor slid into the emptied chair.

Her eyes were as intent as her whirring thoughts, and her long fingers flicked over the number pad with crisp assurance. Usually she worked slowly and carefully, double-and even triple-checking her calculations, but now concentration overcame her normal lack of confidence in her mathematical ability and her fingers flew. A series of complex vectors, some red, some green, flashed across DuChene’s display in rapid succession, but no one spoke as she worked, despite the ticking seconds.

It's going to be tight. Probably too tight, but there's no other way, is there? she thought, still with that inexplicable i

Had Prince Adrian been operating solo, Honor would already have ordered her to begin accelerating straight "up" from the ecliptic on a course which would have given her an excellent chance, not a certainty, but a chance any bookmaker would have taken, of getting away clean from all of her enemies. But she cruiser wasn't operating solo, which meant that simply ru

"Commander Metcalf," she said into the silence about her.

"Yes, Milady?"

"When will Bandit One cross the hyper limit at his present acceleration?"

"In approximately... seventy minutes, Milady," Metcalf replied, and Honor heard McKeon inhale sharply as his tac officer confirmed what Honors own calculations had already told her. She sat quietly for a moment longer, then stood and nodded to DuChene.

"Thank you, Commander. I'm finished now," she said quietly, and another nod of her head drew McKeon back over to the captains chair. She stood for several seconds, looking into her old friend's eyes, then sighed.

"I don't know why Bandit One delayed his pursuit so long, either," she said, "but it's certainly working for him. Do you suppose he's clairvoyant?"

"That's one explanation, at least." McKeon tried to match her feeble attempt at humor, but his eyes were worried. "He's going to be right on top of the convoy at the moment it makes transit."

"Exactly." Honor nodded and pinched the bridge of her nose. On its present course, Bandit One would cross the hyper limit within less than a minute of the moment Thomas Greentree brought the rest of the convoy out of hyper... and the convoy would emerge right in the heart of the Peep's missile envelope.

It was unlikely Greentree would have time to realize what was happening before the first broadsides arrived. The odds might be five-to-one in favor of the convoy escorts, but the overwhelming advantage of surprise would go a long way towards canceling that numerical edge even in a stand-up fight. And the Peep might not even choose to engage the escorts at all, might not even see them with all those fat, defenseless merchantmen and transports on his targeting display. There were almost a hundred thousand garrison troops and technicians aboard the perso

That could not be allowed to happen. It must not be allowed to, and Honor dared not assume the Peeps were any stupider than she was. Indeed, their presence here, and the ominous absence of Commodore Yeargin's command, was a clear indication that this batch of Peeps, at least, knew what it was about. Which was the reason why Prince Adrian couldn't simply run for it.

If Prince Adrian came to a heading which made it impossible for Bandit One to overhaul, the Peep might do one of several things. He might continue the pursuit anyway, however unlikely that he could overtake his prey, on the principle that someone else might head Prince Adrian off and force her to break back towards him. Or he might simply give up, decelerate, and return to his original station, leaving his consorts to deal with her. Or he might do what Honor would do in his place: head for the point at which Prince Adrian had made her alpha translation. Bandit One would have to consider the possibility that Adrian was a singleton, but a captain with imagination would also allow for the possibility that she wasn't. That she had, in fact, arrived as exactly what she was: the lead scout of a convoy which would follow her into normal-space shortly.

And that was why Honor had to throw away her best chance to avoid action.

"We can't let that happen, Alistair," she said, still quietly. "And I'm afraid I see only one way to guarantee that it doesn't."

"We make him chase us," McKeon said flatly.

"Yes." Honor reached out to the arm of his command chair and tapped a function key, throwing one of the evasion patterns she'd entered at DuChene's station onto McKeon's repeater plot. "If we alter course about thirty-five degrees to port and go to five hundred gravities for fifteen minutes, then break back for the limit in the same plane," she said, "we'll swing away from Two, Three, and Four. Two will still have a chance to overhaul us, but only if she's got some accel in reserve. But we'll be giving One a chance to cut the angle on us and bring us to action short of the limit. Not by much. I estimate we'll be in his engagement envelope for no more than twenty-five minutes. To get the shot, though, he'll have to conform to our movements... which should put the convoy's translation point outside his range on emergence."

"I see." McKeon studied the vectors on his plot, then cleared his throat. "I can't fault your logic, Ma'am," he said quietly, "and if he's the only one with a shot at us, he'd almost have to take it on the theory of a bird in the hand's being worth two in hyper. But suppose he doesn't?"

"If he doesn't, he doesn't," Honor replied, "but it's all we can do. Even if we turned immediately to engage him, we'd need over an hour just to decelerate to rest relative to Adler... and we'd be another forty-three million klicks further in-system. He'd certainly maintain his present course and acceleration until he was inside the hyper limit, and Bandit Two would have so much overtake by the time we started back out-system that he'd run right up our backside before we ever engaged Bandit One."

McKeon rubbed his chin for a moment, then decided not to ask what she intended to do if her proposed course took them into the clutches of yet another Peep, one which hadn't brought its drive up and so had no impeller signature to warn them it was waiting for them. She would have considered that just as he had, and, also as he had, come to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do about it if it happened.